Einstein@Home Finds an Elusive Pulsar
Now, personal-computer time volunteered through the Einstein@Home project has resulted in the discovery of a pulsar that has been hiding from observers for years.
...The team conducted a blind search for pulsations coming from the general direction of the gamma-ray source. Two things were needed for this search: clever data analysis and a lot of computing power. The data analysis algorithm was designed to be adaptive: it searched a 4-dimensional parameter space that included a safety margin, allowing the algorithm to wander if the source was at the edge of the parameter space. The computing power was contributed by tens of thousands of personal computers volunteered by participants in the Einstein@Home project, making much shorter work out of a search that would have required dozens of years on a single laptop.
Sky position of pulsar

This new search method turned out to be exactly what was needed: the team was able to identify pulsed emission coming from a point located significantly outside of the source’s original confidence region.